Darren Samuelson decided to build his very own giant camera. Took him around 6 months to build it in his own apartment. This is the ultimate real photography DIY project.

“I built a great big camera, and figured there might be a few folks who would be interested in the process. The idea started when I read something about people using x-ray film in regular cameras as a cheaper alternative to photographic film. For 10 sheets of the film I normally shoot with, I could get about 125 sheets of the x-ray film. This new film, although cheap, is very fickle stuff, but once you learn all the tricks, it can be just as sharp as most other films, but it really requires special handling. When the film is wet, you can rub the emulsion off with your fingers, so tray developing must be done with extreme caution. You can’t develop this film in a rotary tank because it’s got a photosensitive coating on both sides.

I started researching lenses and materials for probably a year before I decided to do it. The was no design in place. It seemed easier for my head to build the camera one section at a time. The bellows were first. I had to move my couch and almost everything else out of my apartment’s living room just so I could lay the material flat and glue everything together. Two weeks of hard labour, windows open, and contact cement everywhere. When it was time to fold the bellows down, they wouldn’t go. I tried all kinds of things, clamps, taping them to the floor, coffee, nothing worked, I had measured incorrectly. All that time was wasted with exception to the hard lesson. The next day, I ordered more of the materials and 3 weeks later, I had my bellows. From the bellows, I built the rear portion of the camera, then the front, the rails, etc. I used my 4×5 and 8×10 cameras as reference for building the different sections. Construction time was about seven months, although I still don’t consider it done. Shooting with the camera much more difficult than my 4×5 or 8×10, but the results are quite impressive. The success is always mixed with failure, but that’s ok.”